The Gift(s): Part 2

[below is the continuation of a story begun on a friend's blog. If you'd like to pick up where I left off, post a comment with a link to your blog continuation of the story.]

"I dunno. What if he remembers?" She looked down at her hands.

"He won't."

She shrugged, "Well, I can't just let them go. Not without making sense of them."

He tilted his head forward and peered at her over the top of his glasses—a judging look. "Uh, yeah, that seems to be going so well."

An awkward silence drained away a few seconds, feeling like minutes.

Then her eyes narrowed, and the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. "Actually, I think I have one figured out."

She pulled out the drawer of boxes, rapidly opening and closing the tiny boxes as she searched for the one she wanted. When she'd found it, she thrust the open box up under his nose. He stepped back so that he could actually see what was inside.

"A purple plastic dinosaur?"

"Yep." She smiled.

"So?"

"There was this time we went on a daylong road trip to see all the cheesy museums in a thirty mile radius. There was one filled with old sewing machines and another with moldy looking miners' clothes and pieces of fool's gold. It sounds boring, but we'd pop into a museum for twenty or thirty minutes—just long enough to take it in—then we would get back into the car and imagine what the people who owned the artifacts would think of their belongings rotting in a hokey small-town museum only visited by people passing through who needed to stretch their legs on the way to somewhere better. It was a great time."

Her eyes were unfocused, and she was smiling as she reminisced. He waved his hand in front of her face to bring her back to the present.

"And the dinosaur? Did you visit a museum of old dinosaur toys abandoned by children for generations?"

She punched him in the arm affectionately. "No. One of the gas stations was an old Sinclair station with a big cement dinosaur out front, but instead of being green, theirs was painted purple. I probably would have forgotten about it except when we got back in the car he pretended he was the dinosaur and lamented being stuck in the middle of nowhere painted an unnatural color. It was only a couple of seconds of insignificant joking."

"Maybe it wasn't so insignificant. Do you think he knew why it reminded him of you when he bought it? Or do you think he had no idea and bought it anyway?"